AIMEE K. WILES PUDONG * In the scanning center of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Zou Ye, in foreground, and Gao Zengqiang enter data that can be easily accessed to serve customers. The bank is Kodak's largest customer in document imaging.

By Ben Rand
Democrat and Chronicle

SHANGHAI (June 25, 2000) -- Every time a customer requests a copy of an old transaction, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China mounts a real-life search-and-rescue operation.

The bank first has to locate the customer in an index, then dispatch two employees to one of four giant warehouses to unearth the bound volume that (hopefully) contains the transaction.

It's not as easy as it sounds: Each warehouse is four stories tall and contains six million transaction books; each book has 600 to 800 individual transactions.

It takes a week to 10 days just to find the right piece of paper. Now multiply that by ICBC's millions of customers.

But the bank is erasing that nightmare of inefficiency with Eastman Kodak Co.'s help. ICBC -- with 560,000 employees, one of the world's largest banks -- recently bought 30 Kodak document scanners to convert much of the paperwork it generates in Shanghai into digital photocopies stored on computer.

As a result, the time it takes to find a customer's old bank statement, deposit slip or other record will be reduced from a matter of days to a matter of minutes.

The computerized process will help ICBC become leaner at a time when it and other Chinese banks are facing new competition.

China has promised reforms in the financial services sector as part of its pending entry into the World Trade Organization. Those reforms will allow U.S. and other foreign banks to expand into the lucrative Chinese market.

The Shanghai scanning project is part of a mandate from ICBC headquarters to reduce paperwork to meet the challenges. The bank is the single largest customer for Kodak scanners in the world.

So far, so good: In the first eight months, the machines scanned more than 30 million documents generated by just 16 of 28 branches in Shanghai, said Zhou Ding Hua, director of maintenance and logistics.

Kodak is the first company to sell document scanners in China, which should give an idea how big an opportunity it has.

Besides banking, Kodak is focusing sales attention on the government and other public agencies, courts and law enforcement, stock exchanges and land planning, said Gerry Chang, general manager of document imaging for Greater China.

Some customers in China still prefer microfilm for document storage, Chang said, but scanners ''are our future.''